The unusual Miyajima Shilabe moving-coil cartridge ($2800) came to my attention through a friend, and I obtained one from the importer, Robin Wyatt of Robyatt Audio, a music lover and dedicated audiophile who imports gear as a sideline, and who lives nearby in New Jersey.
The Shilabe's documentation is unintentionally humorous, but were I buying a cartridge at this price point, I wouldn't be amused. The cartridge pins aren't marked, but the one-sheet enclosed in the package identifies which is which, advising, "Please be connected to a color." I concur! "This Mature is devised…
Art Dudley wrote about the Miyajima Shilabe in October 2010 (Vol.33 No.10):
It's like this at the beginning of every movement: You shift to a different technology, but then the penny drops. Your old mono cartridge can't play your new stereo LPs. Your old tube amp can't drive your new acoustic-suspension loudspeakers. Your old $10,000 FM tuner can't honor your new XM subscription. Eventually, your old high-compliance cartridge can't play your newly reissued mono LPs.
Now you've made the switch to a vintage idler-wheel turntable and a proper 12" tonearm, and you wonder: What the…
Sidebar: Specifications
Description: Low-output, low-compliance, moving-coil phono cartridge, with Shibata stylus. Nominal output voltage: 0.23mV. Internal impedance: 16 ohms. Compliance: 10cu (10–6cm/dyne). Recommended downforce: 2.5–3.2gm.
Weight: 10.4gm.
Price: $2800.
Manufacturer: Miyajima Laboratory, Otono-Edison, 1-45-111, Katae 5-chome, Jounan-ku, Fufuoka, 814-0142 Japan. Web: www.miyajima-lab.com. US distributor: Robyatt Audio. Web: www.robyattaudio.com.
Vivid speakers change the game. But first a great piano recording: Tributaries: Reflections on Tommy Flanagan (CD, IPO IPOC1004), from the late Sir Roland Hanna (his title was an honorary knighthood granted by Liberia). I missed this wonderfully crafted solo-piano recording when it first came out in 2003, and still would not have known about it today except that a publicist sent me an e-mail saying that he was cleaning out his shelves of leftover promotional copies. I quickly sent back a request, in large part because one of my Desert Island recordings is Jim Hall's Concierto, originally…
For whatever reason, Roland Hanna wasn't blessed with the major career Tommy Flanagan had, though their playing was quite similar. Perhaps Hanna's "classical" touch was a bit more incisive or muscular, but it never was too heavy. Indeed, whereas Flanagan began as a clarinet player, Hanna studied classical piano as a boy, and went on to study at both Juilliard and the Eastman School. Just listen to the poignant rubato toward the end of "A Child Is Born," and then the way Hanna brings out Impressionist harmonies in Evans and Livingston's "Never Let Me Go."
I have babbled on too long and…
Initial setup brought to light some quirks. One, the speaker terminals are set up for biwiring, so jumpers are required. Although the terminals are sourced from WBT, there's not enough clearance between the terminals' plastic hex nuts and the overhanging lip of the back of the integral stand's base to allow use of a standard speaker-lug wrench. So the nuts were never really tight. If I were buying these speakers, I'd get speaker cables terminated with banana plugs at the loudspeaker end, and use the lug nuts for the biwire jumper.
Another factor is that, obviously, a monitor speaker…
Ideally, LPs should be played with the pickup stylus remaining tangential (ie, at a 90° angle) to the groove—just as the lacquer from which the LP was ultimately stamped was cut in the first place. Over the years, many attempts have been made to accomplish this. Back in 1877, Thomas A. Edison's original machines tangentially tracked his cylinders, but Emil Berliner's invention of the flat disc put an end to cylinders altogether. In the 1950s, a number of companies marketed so-called "tangential" trackers that used dual arms, based on conventional pivoting arrangements, to change the angle at…
Rockport's Andy Payor eventually redesigned the 6000, changing its effective vertical mass to get the arm's resonant frequency within the optimal range. But by then I couldn't justify to myself the hassles and tradeoffs inherent in any so-called tangential-tracking arm. I think the amount of distortion added by a properly set up and well-designed pivoted arm is lower than what's added by the rest of a typical audio system.
The HiFiction Thales AV
Designed and manufactured by Micha Huber, a fastidious young Swiss mechanical engineer, musician, and watchmaker, the HiFiction Thales…
If you set your stylus rake angle (SRA) to 92° using an LP of medium thickness (150gm), that setting should suffice for all thicknesses of vinyl, given how much movement would be required at the rear end of the arm to produce a change in SRA of even 1°. If you set it by ear, just be careful, and tighten the grub screw when you're done.
Setting the antiskating force requires you to turn a disc on a threaded rod under the rear cardanic bearing. Here, again, you must exercise extreme caution. Without a test LP such as Telarc's out-of-print Omnidisc, setting antiskating on the Thales AV is…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Parallel-tracking, pivoted tonearm.
Price: $12,360.
Manufacturer: HiFiction AG, St. Gallerstrasse 20, CH-8352 Elsau, Switzerland. Tel: (41) 52-202-43-12. Web: www.tonarm.ch. US distributor: High Water Sound LLC, 274 Water Street 2F, New York, NY 10038. Tel: (212) 608-8841. Fax: (212) 571-5809. Web: www.highwatersound.com.
